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About


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About


Providing Context is an effort to contextualize Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities. 

This site offers approaches at contextualization through both spatial mapping and the creation of two historical timelines, one of the fiction's history the other a history of the author.

Providing Context is an effort to provide historical and spatial contextualizing information of a novel through an interactive and digital medium. The project begins with Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.  Providing Context offers one lens for reading of A Tale, which you will see in the selection of events and spaces found on the maps and timelines. As only a sliver of historical and geographical information is provided for the audience, I have created assignments to teach the tool through use and question.

Providing Context begins with A Tale but has a life well beyond this novel. 

As a future educator I designed this tool, to teach A Tale and created a framework to continually provide context for many others texts. It is my hope and mission to encourage students to research a little further, to ask questions, and to deepen their conversations and understanding of literature.

      

Why Timelines


There are in our existence spots of time, That with distinct pre-eminence retain a renovating virtue.

Wordsworth

Why Timelines


There are in our existence spots of time, That with distinct pre-eminence retain a renovating virtue.

Wordsworth

Dickens wrote A Tale, during the 1850’s in England, the action of a tale takes place fro 1757-92 in Paris & London. Dickens was not only writing back to an event, which occurred a Century prior, he was too constructing the feeling of Paris & London a Century prior. These spatial and historical complexities Dickens wove into the framework of a tale enrich the novel and reader. To explore these complexities readers must have a firm grasp of the time of the novel, the time of the writer, and of the writer's own history.

The timelines are not comprehensive nor were they designed to be. Each point was purposefully selected and fits into each timeline to argue for historical importance. They were drafted to provide common knowledge (to the extent that dickens’ readership might have) for readers.

Why Maps


Why Maps


Similar to the points that populate the timelines, the points on each map were selected. Unlike the timelines, these points were exclusively pulled from spaces named in A Tale of Two Cities. This mapping tool approaches contextualization of A Tale in a similar manner as the timelines, however, this approach aims to visually contextualize the space the novel occurs in. The maps are not bound by time in fact modern images of all points are provided- in doing so Providing Context aims to bridge the gap between 18th and 19th Century London and Paris with the cities of the 21st Century

The Research


The Research